Towards an Energy Politics In‐Against‐and‐Beyond the State: Berlin's Struggle for Energy Democracy

Social movements in struggle around energy are currently developing an imaginary of “energy democracy” to signify the emancipatory energy transitions they desire. Deploying a scholar‐activist perspective, this paper contributes to debates around the concretisation of the energy democracy imaginary by exploring the relationship of energy democracy movements to the state. To do so, I focus on the experiences of the Berliner Energietisch campaign, which in 2013 forced (and lost) a referendum aiming to extend—and democratise—the local state's role in Berlin's energy governance. Drawing on relational theories of the state, I argue that it is productive to read Berliner Energietisch as enacting an energy politics in‐against‐and‐beyond the state. In making this argument, I draw out implications for theoretical and strategic debates around the commons and the state.     

Poverty and Agrarian‐Forest Interactions in Thailand

In this paper we address the often sterile and circular debates over relationships between poverty and deforestation. These debates revolve around questions of whether forest loss causes poverty or poverty contributes to forest encroachment, and questions of whether it is loss of access to forests or dependence on forest‐based livelihoods that cause poverty. We suggest that a way beyond the impasse is to set such debates within the context of agrarian change. Livelihoods of those who live in or near forests depend considerably on a rapidly changing agriculture, yet agrarian contexts receive only background attention in popular, political and academic discourse over poverty and forests. Moreover, to the extent that agriculture is considered, little heed is paid to social, technical and economic change. We therefore address agriculture's changing relationships with the wider economy, otherwise referred to as the agrarian transition, and with the natural resource base on which it depends. The paper draws on the experience of Thailand to illustrate our key argument, and more specifically addresses the situation on the resource periphery through a look at the agriculture‐forest interface.     

The Role of the Speaker in the 20th Century

Baroness Boothroyd was Speaker of the house of commons from April 1992 until October 2000. She describes her approach to the job of Speaker: how she routinely briefed herself for the business of the House, and how she approached some of the more difficult decisions required of the Speaker, including the selection of amendments, the use of the casting vote and allowing members to make personal statements. She comments on some issues concerning the management of the House's business during her time in the chair: the practice of government ministers to anticipate official statements in the media before they are made in the House; the length of ministerial answers at question time and the decision on the access of Sinn Fein members to the facilities and services of the House. She refers to the functions of the Speaker outside the chamber: chairing the house of commons commission; receiving Speakers and other public figures from other countries and representing the house of commons abroad.     

The Waste Commons in an Emerging Resource Recovery Waste Regime: Contesting Property and Value in Melbourne's Hard Rubbish Collections

Practices of scavenging of Melbourne's hard rubbish collections are examined in the context of an emerging resource recovery waste regime linked with policy shifts that promote resource recovery over disposal through landfill. Waste regimes have many parallels with regimes in natural resource management and contestations over property are an important but neglected aspect. Based on research conducted primarily in the south eastern suburbs of Melbourne, I argue that hard rubbish on the kerb‐side forms an informal ‘waste commons’ that facilitates various forms of revaluing of municipal household waste. Results of a survey conducted by householders scavenging of their own hard rubbish piles suggest that informal scavenging activities were more effective for diverting waste from landfill by recycling than the formal processes of council hard rubbish contractors. Interviews conducted with residents, waste management contractors and self identified ‘professional’ scavengers revealed different perspectives on the waste commons and highlighted the contested nature of property in hard rubbish. Together with the survey findings, they allow tentative conclusions to be drawn about the role of the waste commons in the transition from a regime of disposal through landfill to one focused on resource recovery.     

AN IMPERIAL SYLLABUS

Ten Books That Shaped the British Empire, edited by distinguished historians Antoinette Burton and Isabel Hofmeyr, brings together ten essays on individual books with a substantial methodological introduction. Covering the full geographical expanse of the Empire, the volume seeks to unify book and imperial history through careful accounts of the circulation, recycling, and uptake of each of the books under consideration. The upshot is an invaluable overall work with important individual contributions. At the same time, the project's methodology and mode of presentation raise questions for the writing of history, particularly at the nexus of the histories of empire and of the book, that are reiterated but never queried within the volume itself. Specifically, in its focus on the moment of the circulation of texts, Ten Books That Shaped the British Empire reflects a general condition in the human sciences: a resistance to narrative, to causality, and to critique, which this essay attempts to describe and briefly explain.     

Rethinking Justice: Struggles For Environmental Commons and the Notion of Socio‐Ecological Justice

This article introduces a notion of socio‐ecological justice based on theoretically informed empirical research on community struggles against run‐of‐river hydropower plants in Turkey. Framing this particular case as representative of a broader movement for environmental commons, and adopting an action‐theoretical perspective, it translates the emergent justice claims produced by grassroots environmental movements to the conceptual vocabulary of the theory of justice. Using Fraser's tripartite model as a starting point, it explores possibilities of expanding the borders of justice as a concept. Maintaining the intrinsic relationship between social and ecological phenomena, it calls for rethinking “sociality” and “social justice” in the light of a relational ontology of human and non‐human worlds. The notion of socio‐ecological justice, thus, extends the community of justice, framing the relational existence of human and non‐human ecologies as a matter of justice.     

“Hungry for Knowledge”: Towards a Meso‐History of the Environmental Sciences

In recent years, cultural studies and cultural theory have experienced a new wave of ecological thought. Despite the engagement with the Anthropocene the history of ecology and the environmental sciences has remained somewhat of a puzzle. This goes especially for the 20^th century, a period when the sciences of the environment came to matter on a broader scale. Why do we actually know so little about the environmental sciences in the 20^th century? And what could a history of the environmental sciences in that period look like? This article answers these questions with two interrelated arguments. First, by reflecting on different approaches to write the history of ecology since the 1970s, it uncovers crucial entanglements between the history of science and ecological thought that created blind spots regarding the environmental sciences in the 20^th century. Second, it argues for a shift in scales of analysis—towards meso‐scales. With a more regional approach historians can engage with the often‐neglected aspects of the political and economic history of the environmental sciences in the 20th century and thereby also reveal their fundamental infrastructural dimension. Because at its core, the article claims, the environmental sciences were and are essentially infrastructural sciences.     

Six theses on waste,value, and commons

The origins of capitalist value theory lie in transformations of property through enclosure of ‘commons-as-waste’ and practices of ‘commoning’ that supported these. These processes, repeated with difference, remain with us. Capitalist value production becomes a structure of necessity in societies that are profit seeking rather than needs oriented; the history of capitalist value is one of the unrelenting attempts to subordinate needs-oriented forms of value production to its accumulative logic. In the process, it continuously casts certain people, places, and conducts as wasteful, superfluous, or residual. In short, capitalist value constantly battles to assert its normative superiority over and autonomy from other forms of value production that interweaves with it. Waste, immanent to capital's becoming-being, poses a jeopardy to capital accumulation: it is, on the one hand, capitalist value-in-waiting and on the other hand, it is an omnipresent logic of dissipation that evades or exceeds capital's dialectic, threatening its legitimacy and existence.     

Etching the Law on the Land: The Role of Landscape and Custom in Defining the Space of the Hungarian Village in the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries

Abstract

This article explores the interaction between the historical landscape of Hungary and the structure of rural society that developed therefrom. It establishes the means through which the Hungarian peasantry were able to construct the spatial order of the village in response to the particular environment of the Hungarian plain, and how this informed attempts to reform Hungarian rural society in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. In this, it argues that customary practices and customary rights, in particular ‘beating the bounds’ (határjárás), provided a means for the peasantry to assert their own claims to the landscape in the face of reforms imposed from beyond the boundaries of the village.     

Experimental Publics: Activist Culture and Political Intelligibility of Climate Change Action in the Hunter Valley,Southeast Australia

The ethnographic study of Western environmental activism opens up the prospect of studying subjectivities formed in opposition to dominant Western ideas and values, and yet encapsulated within Western societies and democratic polities. One of the directions in which it points the anthropologist, which is pursued in this article, is towards the study of the political lifeworlds of activists, their self‐identity as citizens and their embeddedness in the wider society. Environmental politics can be an emergent activity in citizens' lives, as expressed in John Dewey's concept of ‘the public’ as citizens who organise themselves to address the adverse consequences of situations that they experience in common (Dewey 1991[1927]). This paper focuses on a middle ground of social action between habitual daily practice, and the domain of institutional politics: groups of people in small voluntary organisations in the heavily coal‐mined Hunter Valley, Southeast Australia, who are moved to collective action to address the threatening aspects of anthropogenic climate change. Action group members variously articulate their reflexive understandings of the structural contradictions of environmentalism in corporate capitalist societies where values of consumerism and processes of individualization corrode collective concerns of citizenship‐based politics. These understandings inform activists' personal motivations, values and ideals for a ‘climate movement’, diverse modes of political action and striving for wider political intelligibility.